


January, 2017

by ussnicole



Series: Welcome to Suburbia [11]
Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Anxiety, Band, Car Radio, Hallucinations, Homecoming, M/M, Mental Illness, Songfic, Suburbia, The Judge - Freeform, Thinking too much, Trees, hometown, they haven't made it yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-12-04 01:46:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11544867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ussnicole/pseuds/ussnicole
Summary: Dysphoria in Suburbia.Tyler never foresaw life becoming so meaningless.





	1. Hometown

**Author's Note:**

> Please help me decide! I will be doing a full year's worth of months, but they range from 1979 to 3019. Should I do them in month order or chronologically (by year)? I don't know, either way works. Either way this fic will be in a different place than it is now. The order will change as I write each story.

Tyler tapped his fingers against his knees listlessly, staring out the window of the van. After a small tour of the Midwest, Tyler and his band mate Josh were finally home. It hadn’t been a very eventful tour; the people who did come out to shows were there for the main act, and rarely did they care about two boys from another Suburbia. It was really no surprise that their coming home was one of prodigal sons rather than small town heroes. No one knew who they were yet. Tyler just kept his eyes out the window, mind set on playing bigger venues.

They’d get there eventually.

It’s late when they pull up to Tyler’s house, just past midnight. Josh has a key and even though it is snowing Tyler insists on going for a walk, “Just to clear my head.” The street lamps have flickered on hours ago, and their yellow light illuminates wide circles that dot the streets in an endless line. Tyler’s house is on 8th Avenue, which means that if he walks long enough, he’ll end up on Ocean Avenue, and then he’ll be at the beach. The snow doesn’t stick there, and the waves break up the silence and wash it away like sugar dissolving in hot tea.

Tyler doesn’t think he’ll make it that far. His bones are cold. His shadow tilts its head at him and he forgets to breathe for a minute. When he remembers his lips are blue and his lungs are screaming.

Tyler wonders if the sun will ever rise again.

He’s been wandering for a lot longer than he meant to, and he thinks he’s forgotten how to put back the warmth that was in his bones. Tyler suddenly can’t remember which way home is, and he’s stuck in a dark place between street light circles, and the spirits in the shadows are suffocating him, and –

“Tyler?”

“Josh?”

“Jesus, Tyler, you’re going to freeze! It’s four in the morning, why didn’t you come home?”

“There’s no sun, there’s no sun, there’s no sun…” Tyler repeats this to himself. He doesn’t stop saying it as Josh leads him home, not even noticing that Josh has taken off his sweatshirt and given it to him. He doesn’t stop saying it until they are back in Tyler’s house, until his hands stop shaking, until Josh pulls him to the window and makes him look outside. Makes him see that the sun has risen over the houses and a new day has begun.

Tyler spends that new day sleeping, curled around Josh, like a yin and a yang. Josh doesn’t sleep. How could he? Tyler is freezing.


	2. Car Radio

“You know, Josh, we could make it big someday.” Tyler looked over at Josh, a pillow away. Tyler’s mind, however, was light years away, picturing a screaming crowd, cheering for him. Believing in his songs, relating to his words, singing back his melodies. Josh responded by taking off into dreamland too.

“I do know. Someday, we’ll be playing in stadiums and amphitheaters.”

“That’s all I could hope for and more,” Tyler sighed, rolling over onto his stomach and smiling at Josh.

“Do you want to drive around? We haven’t been home in a while.” Josh sat up slowly, stretching as he spoke and looking back over to Tyler. He wiggled his eyebrows as Tyler followed Josh’s muscles rippling in his back, surreptitiously flexing and making Tyler giggle.

“Let’s take my old car. It’s feeling neglected,” Tyler suggested, referring to the car he had bought when he was 16 and that had stayed while they went off, making sounds at people for money.

“That beat up old thing in the driveway? I didn’t even know it still ran.”

“Don’t say that! You’ll hurt its feeling!” Tyler defended, pulling on sweatpants and a sweatshirt that had been balled up on the floor. Josh laughed, grabbing a pair of shoes from under the bed.

“Oh, it’s singular feeling? Okay, sorry.” Together the two of them walked out to the driveway of Tyler’s house, where the old, late 90’s Grand Marquis was sitting under a few inches of snow.

“Oh shit,” Tyler exclaimed as he cleared the snow, peering into the car. Josh leaned over and tried to look into the window and then frowned in confusion.

“What?”

“Someone stole my radio!”

“Well, they had the good manners not to break the windows,” Josh remarked dryly, causing Tyler to elbow him in the ribs.

“But my radio!” Tyler opened up the doors and traced the empty slot where his radio once was dejectedly. Josh got into the passenger side, brushing old Taco Bell and gum wrappers onto the floor.

“Look! They left all this trash you refuse to get rid of. Apparently it really is worthless.” Josh held up a taco wrapper for Tyler to see, only to receive sarcasm in response.

“That is my favorite Taco Bell wrapper, thank you very much.”

“I think you’re just too lazy to throw it all away.”

“Yeah, whatever. Still! My radio. What a jerk.”

“You could report it.”

“Too much work.”

“Lazy.”

A week went by. Two weeks. Snow melted and was replaced with a new, fresh white blanket. Tyler drove his car, hating it more and more as the empty slot in his dashboard provided no solace for his wayward mind. He also found his mind wandering, drifting deeper and deeper into areas of thought he generally avoided due to their insistence on making him feel small, insignificant, and afraid.

The only way he knew to battle these feelings was to pour them into songs, and then play those songs for people. Someone was bound to understand. Well, Josh seemed to. But… Josh had always understood. That wasn’t such an accomplishment anymore. ‘Congratulations! Your second half feels exactly the way you do!’

 Not much to write home about.


	3. The Judge

On one of the many nights Tyler woke up hours before Josh’s dreams would even begin to wind down, Tyler found himself pulling on his shoes and stumbling to the bathroom to wash his face and contemplate going on a walk. Upon flipping the light switch he was confronted with three quarters of the light he was used to. Normally, he realized, he wouldn’t have noticed, but he had been up late arguing with his reflection about his point in life and singing sad songs that made his walls condemn him.

When it came to mental problems, Tyler was one of those, ‘if you’ve got one, you’ve got them all’ kinds of people.

The water from the faucet was freezing cold, prompting Tyler to curse quietly and then contemplate jumping back in bed with Josh and stealing his body heat. The lights flickered and decided for him, and he was out the door just before the second light bulb blinked out. There never were extra light bulbs in the house anyway. It was far too early to pick them up now, but the way Tyler’s walks usually went, by the time he was ready to come home stores would have been open for quite a while.

Tyler never was good at directions, and so he found himself on Sebring Street – which, as far as he knew, was very far from his own house. He felt slightly better as his wanderings brought him to Second Street, but he still didn’t know if 8th was further on Sebring or back the way he came. He stood on the corner for a while, knocking snow off of the chain link fence that surrounded the snow-covered yard of the house he was in front of. It was a small house, quiet and dark, and Tyler wondered for a minute who lived there. It looked old, like a piece of history, and it made him even colder.

“I should have stayed inside my house,” Tyler told himself, watching his breath billow out ahead of him.

Maybe Hell was hot for good reason – only the doubters’ souls ever got this cold.


	4. Trees

Tyler’s own personal Suburbia had the unique position of being both a beach and forest town. To the west, the ocean stretched out for immeasurable miles, calling for all surfers, bikini babes, and hopeless dreamers. To the east, mountains rose up into the clouds, calling for all adventurers, outcasts, and lost souls.

Usually, Tyler would be more drawn to the beach, where the roar of the waves replaced the dull silence of the world around him; today was a different matter. Josh had left a few hours ago, proclaiming that he would be spending the day hiking in the forest. Josh fell under the ‘adventurer’ category. He was also a bikini babe, but Tyler never told him to his face. Tyler fell under the ‘hopeless dreamer’ and ‘lost soul’ categories, and he was fairly certain that both he and Josh knew this very well.

With nothing to do at home and a heavy conscience that was telling Tyler that everything was wrong, he packed up a small backpack with an extra jacket and a few snacks and then took his car up to the trail head off the stretch of Highway 101 that ran out of the city and was fondly dubbed the ‘Miracle Mile’ by the city’s inhabitants. Just off the highway was a small trailhead that lead up to and around a small lake that fed off into the ocean in the summer and that froze over in the winter. It was a favorite for ice skaters in the cold months and swimmers in the warm ones, but Josh was neither. He just enjoyed the hike.

Damn him.

Tyler, on the other hand, hated hiking. He always had trouble with the uneven ground and long distances, and the forest never really filled the void in his mind that the beach did. It was too quiet among the pines and shrubbery, and Tyler always felt empty when he left. But Josh was in there somewhere, and Tyler was bored and lonely.

After hiking up into the wilderness for almost an hour, Tyler stopped abruptly and listened. A jaunty whistle cut through the trees, an upbeat tune that sounded like sunshine and hot cocoa and a warm hug all at the same time. _Josh_. Tyler wanted to run to him and hug him until they both fell apart, but he hesitated, something stopping him. He just stood silently, feeling small and cowardly. How was he so lucky? How did he somehow meet Josh, who just happened to be the most perfect person in the world? Tyler found himself wanting to meet Josh all over again, to introduce himself and say hello and see if Josh would still want to be his friend, his _boyfriend_ , if he met him today rather than all those years ago.

A snowball whistled through the air and landed – _splat!_ – on Tyler’s chest, followed by a laugh that sounded like jazz and homemade cooking and love, and Tyler’s mind emptied. What had he been worrying about? It was probably stupid.

Josh had that effect on him.


End file.
